Feilding Star Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 1920. STANDARDS OF MORALITY.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 4012, 11 June 1920, Page 2

Feilding Star Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 1920. STANDARDS OF MORALITY.

.The trend towards a deplorable lower standard of morality and an undesirable incrustation of the public conscience is indicated by two of the latest agitations in Australia and New Zealand. On the other side of Tasman Sea the agitators have been successful in making the Federal Government set up a Royal Commission to reviow the sentences passed upon the I.W.W. fiends who wore convicted of acts of sabotage and plots to continue the wholesale destruction of the lives and properties of Australians. Tliese enemies in the midst—industrial as

well as political— were given a fair trial. Yet because a group of their sympathisers made a persistent noise loud and frequent enough to bo heard by and to annoy statesmen and politicians, the incarcerated criminals are likely to be treated as first class political prisoners, forsooth! Can it be that the influence of Lenin ancl Trotsky extends from Moscow even

unto Melbourne, and that a contingency of the release of British prisoners in Russia is tlie release of Bolsheviks hi Australia:' li : that be ao, lot 11. Hope Unit it i.iay iutnu to Liv iluu a release, but an exctmnge, and that the Heels will not be let loose on the Commonweal titers, but will be shipped direct to ilunfand or Leninland. Over here in New Zealand we have to regret that in Auckland there were enough citizens to constitute a meeting to protest against the penalty of death being passed upon the murderer of the Postmaster of Pousonby. The evidence was damning, proving the crime to be one of cold-blooded dehberateness. The accused was all the moi-4? brutal- in his atrocity because he was'in the prime of his young manhood. He was given a fair trial, and the proof against him was overwhelming. Yet even such a callous brute as Gunn has his sympathisers, aud they seek to taint the springs of justice by a misuse of public agitation and petition. Cabinet has played into the hands of the men who have given this exhibition of a lowering of the standard of public morality by delaying the decision of the Executive with regard to the death sentence passed upon Gunn by the Judge who assumed the black cap. The Executive should have endorsed the sentence promptly, and named an early date for the hanging of such a wretch. The extreme penalty is not inflicted as an act ot legal revenge, but as a deterrent, as a declaration that no man shall commit murder with impunity. It the brutal murderer is to get public sympathy, then what becomes of our high standard of morality?